


Tintin and Le Beau Monde

by doubledecks



Category: Tintin - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Committed Relationship, Confessions, Glove Kink, Height Kink, M/M, Slow Burn, Sugar Daddy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-25
Updated: 2018-02-26
Packaged: 2019-03-24 01:19:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 5,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13800342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doubledecks/pseuds/doubledecks
Summary: Captain Haddock's newfound social status seduces and disconcerts his closest friend. Tintin ruminates on the meaning of their relationship, his commitment to his own ambitions, and the dark desires that draw him ever closer to the perfect stranger Haddock has become.





	1. The Overcoat

**Author's Note:**

> This story takes place between the events of Red Rackham's Treasure and The Seven Crystal Balls. A reimagining of Tintin and Haddock's reunion after Haddock inherits his fortune.

After two months with no word, Tintin came to understand that his friend had simply closed another chapter on his life.

It didn't matter that the journalist had happened to be in that chapter. The Captain was an incredibly wealthy man now, and things didn't always turn up square. And with exception of one damnable morning he had mindlessly started tampering with himself in the bath and wound up sobbing, Tintin thought he had handled the whole thing famously.

Scarcely had he fallen back into his customary solitude when he drew his curtains one morning to find a marigold Lincoln-Zephyr convertible parked halfway on the sidewalk.

There was a big to-do, curious children gathering around the grille and Mrs. Finch emerging to see what all the fuss was about. Tintin folded his arms, biting a divot into his knuckle as he tried to evaluate just what it was he was seeing.

Yes, that was the Captain stepping out of the car wearing a derby hat;  _yes_ , that was the Captain in a velvet-lined overcoat which loomed broad and tall as a door. He was a very tall man in general, and there was something patently sinister about the whole scene that gave Tintin an exquisite little shiver of apprehension.

Part of him wanted to rush out at once and greet his friend - to pick up right where they had left off, to toss out every trivial reservation that had needled him for the past eight weeks.

Part of him wanted to run and hide in his steamer trunk.


	2. The Robe

The steamer trunk would have been the sensible option.

Tintin felt tragically underdressed. He was still in just his morning robe, and the more he resolved not to let this phase him, the more it did. His hands shook as they set out the tea and bread; he uttered a swear as a serving spoon flipped out of its bowl and went hurtling across the floor, slinging sugar everywhere.

Haddock was either too polite to comment or didn't seem to notice as Milou scrambled beneath the table to lap it up.

"I'm only one man," he was lamenting, trying in vain to peel a mandarin. "Or maybe it's just that I'm atrociously uncreative...?"

His hair was freshly greased, his beard sculpted into a shape more suited for Zeus of Artemision than a living person. It was utterly absurd how alien he looked in Tintin's kitchen, as if the reporter had purchased him from a museum for an excessive sum but had not a suitable place to put him.

"You'll think of something," Tintin said. His own voice felt strange to him; hollow, like a reed. "There's no rule that says you have to go mad with extravagance. And if I'd known you were in that deep with accountants I would have come and got you sooner. You really only need just one."

"I'll go mad in any case; that seems to be the ultimate horizon for this sort of racket, doesn't it?" Haddock mused.

Tintin had nothing to say of madness nor rackets. He smiled, taking the mandarin from Haddock and prodding at the rind with his thumb.

"What about you?" the Captain asked.

"What about me?" Tintin parroted.

"Is there anything you need? Anything at all? Clothes, books..." Haddock motioned vaguely to the Biwat sculpture sitting on the mantelpiece. "More of whatever the hell that thing is...? My boy, you could run an office out of two of my rooms and I'd still have extra rooms! I shout myself ragged just trying to reach my butler," he added, miserably.  
  
Tintin needed for nothing, yet said nothing. The words seemed to have gotten caught on their way out, smothered by something baser that had suddenly leapt out of the dark at him with startling intensity. It was a feeling that had been surreptitiously stirring in him for quite some time, and which was always threatening to upend everything -

The skin of the mandarin gave and burgeoned with moisture across his hand, and for one brief, devastating moment, he remembered he was naked under his robe.

"Well, I..." It was quite the magnanimous proposal. And he wasn't sure the Captain quite understood what it was he was actually doing. "I'll...give it some thought..."

Haddock was looking at him simply, unassumingly. He seemed tired. Two months since he had secured his fortune, and already his face was bearing the same look of weary desperation Tintin had seen on the faces of so many magnates and kings.

He wanted to be liberated from his responsibility.


	3. The Suit

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter makes a brief allusion to The Blue Lotus.

_Trop fort_ was what Mrs. Finch called it, when a man called too often and courted you with expensive gifts. Tintin had always laughed politely at the truism - it would be good advice for someone, someday.

"My, is that _another_ new suit?"

The reporter flinched as if expecting reprimand, dropping his keys, but Finch was unusually silent as the rumble of the Captain's car faded into town.

It was half-past three in the morning. Ripe with gin and sodden with dull-witted giddiness, Tintin had been trying his best to get into the building as quietly as possible. He had failed.

"Ah..." He had to feel with his hands just to be sure, even as he could clearly see what he was wearing. "...yes."

"Oh, but you always sport such a fine drape-cut. Whatever style's all the rage now has everyone looking like gangsters."

She sounded quite lucid for the hour, and the thought struck Tintin that Finch might be more of a night owl than she let on.

"Er, thank you."

"At any rate, do try and stay out of trouble with that old rake," Finch said hotly. "Remember what I keep telling you about trysts like that..."

Tintin felt as if a fine net had been cast upon him. It was both a blessing and a curse to know when this line had been crossed, for while he enjoyed the theatrics of it all, he did not like having to lie about himself.

"Oh," he said.

"Oh!" he said again, humored. "You think-! Oh, heavens, no. It's not-" A carefree, dauntless laugh. "It isn't like that, at all..."

It was an ancient litany of sorts, this stammering - much like laying flat on the earth and playing dead until a bear went away. Usually it was enough to curtail the occasional straggler who trespassed on his innermost being, assuring them with a mental slight-of-hand that he couldn't desire what he didn't even know.

Twice had this strategy failed him. One of those times was now.

Finch was looking at him rather hopelessly. It was the same look of hopelessness Mr. Wang had worn in the garden that night so many years ago - almost slightly annoyed, as if Tintin had lost too much faith in his fellow man.

She patiently waited for him to tire himself out and lapse into silence, which he did, and then she let that silence go unmolested for a time, looking somewhat contemplative.

"Captain Haddock is a good man," she consoled after a moment, choosing her words more carefully. "His priorities are an absolute disaster, and he's a rotten influence, clearly -" (she gestured at Tintin to illustrate this point) "- but I dare say...that charm of yours could tempt the devil himself into calmer waters, if you ever saw fit to employ it."

The drunken brain slurs its thoughts just as the mouth slurs speech, and it took a moment for Tintin to comprehend what had just happened. The only thing his slippery mind could parse was that Mr. Wang had had much nicer things to say of Tchang, but Tchang was not who he was thinking of right now.

On an impulse, he embraced Mrs. Finch.

He had embraced Mr. Wang as well, pacified in the knowledge that a stolen kiss under the Fengsheng Bridge was nothing to write his chaplain home about. And just as Mr. Wang had, Finch accepted wholeheartedly, giving him what almost felt like the same encouraging pat on the back.

That night, Tintin dreamed he was back aboard the  _Aurora._


	4. The Jacket

The Cocomas of the Upper Amazons ground the bones of their dead relations into fermented liquors.  _Better to be inside a friend than swallowed up in the cold earth,_ they said, and while Tintin found this expression unfathomably beautiful, he didn't think he would ever be able to take camaraderie to quite that literal an extreme.

Thankfully, nothing so drastic happened in a Belgian cigar parlor. In fact, he couldn't help feeling the place deficient in custom altogether.

It was as if people who could well understand each other preferred to always be on the verge of a quarrel lest they become bored, or were so afraid of the silences between words they continuously snatched at the air as if to choke them out. Nobody really conversed as much as they hurled themselves upon ideas and things, mingling in a gauntlet of pretense until they were too intoxicated to keep up and subsequently unloaded onto someone's chauffeur.

Occasionally there would be a classicist in the crowd who would pick him out early on and have him pinned to the wall by a firm arm within the hour, orating on about Plato, divine friendship,  _mos Graecorum_ , and so forth...

Tintin often let this happen. It was a bit of a thrill, if he had to be honest, though he never felt right leading these poor fellows on for too long - playing stupid was all very well, but he could recite  _Symposium_ in his sleep, and he knew, quite fiercely, what he already had.

He could see the object of his desire now behind a curtain of brume and haze, cavorting about like an idiot with his jacket off. Haddock was leading a room of rosy-cheeked financiers in a chantey - funny, that for how much he liked to grouse he hated being the center of attention, he seemed to amass a crew wherever he went.

Tintin knew precisely why. The Captain didn't speak the shallow gibberish of the  _beau monde_ , but in an ungovernable madman's prose that enthralled and delighted everyone. He was like a magician with words, evoking the marauders of their childhood pirate dramas - such a frenetic and volatile soul (stubbornly unorthodox in a way Tintin wished he was, sometimes) that his very presence seemed to breathe life into the dusty sanctums of the old gentry.

"Excuse me," he murmured, extricating himself from the overtures of the young archaeologist who'd cornered him and heading toward that soul.

He and the Captain sang until dawn.


	5. The Broken Glasses

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter makes a brief allusion to King Ottokar's Sceptre.

There was a chill in the air. Tintin remained in bed, listless, until ten o'clock.

Several days had passed and the Captain had still not called.

Tintin didn't pretend not to know why. And he found the whole thing preposterous, knowing what he knew.

He could see the glint of the patina lamps in the foyer as if it was yesterday, the cracked trunk of the overwatered date palm by the fountain. They had been at a little gathering further uptown - a friend of Queen Muskar's, interestingly enough, though neither she nor the King had been in attendance. Tintin was thankful for this fact. He wasn't sure he would ever be able to face either of them again after what he and the King had done on St. Vladimir's night four years past.

A small crisis averted, it seemed; but then suddenly - like a fire built too close to a dry wood - disaster.

Haddock had been speaking at great length with a petroleum tycoon in the conservatory. They had gotten onto the topic of maritime law (specifically, contiguous zones), and through some puzzling undercurrent of shared distaste, it had seemed they were only growing more hostile.

Soon enough, they were openly shouting at each other.

The volley of insults endured for nearly a quarter of an hour, drawing a small crowd. Tintin had almost placated the Captain - had come so close to making him soften like crème and melt into his arms - when the tycoon called Tintin a  _"come-on boy"_ and then Haddock's fist pitched him through a wicker chair into the koi pond.

The incident had left Tintin in shock. It had seemed as if everything about him was moving in slow motion, other guests rushing to pull the waterlogged mogul from the wreckage of fauna and splintered wood as he simply stood there, dumbfounded.

The man's glasses had been shattered, his collar dotted with dark blood. Tintin's usual urge to stay and help - to be useful in any way he could - had been absent; instead he had turned and dutifully followed Haddock out of the manor without a word, a nagging sense of injustice beginning to well in the pit of his stomach.

Initially, he did not know whom to blame for it. Never had he been so blatantly and publicly slandered, yet the only sentiment he could conjure for the man in the conservatory was gratefulness. That man had seen something in him - if only in a crude, half-truth - and he had spoken it boldly for all to hear. There was something about that Tintin respected, even as he wished considerable unpleasantness on the kind of person who did such a thing.

And then there was the Captain, doing his best not to look at it. The dear, sweet Captain, gripping the steering wheel in a vice as he drove Tintin home, the muscles of his neck jumping with barely-contained fury.

Tintin didn't understand why he was so angry. Why it was such an unspeakable idea, when all the evidence the journalist had said that Haddock felt very much otherwise.

It had been a while since he'd looked through the evidence.

It had originally been stashed in a cardboard box along with the rest of the evidence from the  _Karaboudjan_ , and Tintin had neglected to return it because he wasn't quite through with it.

As if he would ever be through with it. The proof he had even unearthed it lived solely with him and would likely die with him, which was an odd thing to imagine. He had stopped logging the times at which he examined it, they'd grown so excessive - he had long since been forced to admit to himself that this wasn't just a routine analysis, that he really was quite enthusiastic about the content of these little publications, and that the Captain really only seemed to have an eye for anyone at least somewhat resembling... _him._

Tintin got up and lit the pilot in the stove. He closed all the curtains in the flat. And then he returned to the bedroom, Milou trotting behind him, and ducked down beneath his bed to pry the baseboard from the wall.


	6. The Waistcoat

"It would be a week or two at the absolute most. And I'd call the moment I returned, you know that."

"A week turns into a month with you," the Captain grumbled, resting an ankle across his knee as he lit his pipe. He still looked altogether too big for a conventional smoking parlor, like some kind of mutineer king, and Tintin resented how much he craved. "What am I supposed to do in the meantime? Knock about the Royal Gaulois by myself?" His eyes narrowed. "Those people are  _berserk._ "

"At least it wouldn't turn into two months," Tintin said, fully aware this was a shot across the Captain's bow but too dispassionate to concern himself. "Perhaps you could-"

"I'm not coming with you."

A fit of temper seized Tintin and he flung the burgundy leather gloves Haddock had given him for Christmas onto the table.

"I can't be everywhere at once," he uttered. And then, a little bolder, "I do still have a profession you know - despite your wanting to...to... _put me up in a bed of roses._ "

His Flemish was bristling a little, making him sound more impertinent than he would have liked. He was also not all too familiar with the idiom, and it was with consummate horror he realized he might have just voiced a wish and not a grievance.

The words took a moment to settle like gravel kicked up from the oncoming tide.

"I've seen what comes of miscreants who try to buy you off," Haddock murmured around the stem of his pipe. "Do you think I would ever dare?" A plume of smoke blossomed from his beard, and Tintin believed to see a glimmer of admiration coursing somewhere in his wild stare. "You needn't ever humor me, lad - I'd love you all the same."

 _Love._ It was a word they used often and freely as brothers might, but Tintin had found himself smarting pleasantly to the sound of it as of late, really letting it quarter him.

"I know," he said. "I...I know."

The Captain's bulk obscured all of the light in the room as his tense arms wound across Tintin's back, pulling the journalist firmly to his chest.

Tintin breathed in the Courtrai wool, for the moment void of thought; the chatter and noise of the parlor carried on around them, and he could distinctly hear the steward turn on his heel nearby.

"I think you missed your drink order," he muttered into the Captain's waistcoat.

"Blast," Haddock said. He made a small contented noise Tintin could feel in his teeth, and then he pushed the reporter back to arm's length by the shoulders, righting him in his chair. "In any case, it is eleven-thirty."

"You act like we're still under curfew."

"Hold your tongue," Haddock said grimly.

"Sorry..." Tintin said. "It's just..."

He felt sheepish, because he remembered that in the morning he would be setting off for a region where a curfew was just going into effect.

An acute panic struck him that never had before. It was as if he was being torn in two, because the Captain would rise soon and crack his neck with a throaty grunt, and then they would be in the Zephyr heading back into town, and then Tintin would be lying awake until the murky onset of twilight tinted his room grey, the promise of half-sleep on the train dragging him out of bed as daybreak blemished the horizon a slightly bluer grey...

On the other hand, there was his landlady forthrightly telling him in no unclear terms that he could charm the devil himself.

Before he could help it, Tintin seized one of the Captain's hands in his own and pressed a kiss to his knuckles.

"Come with me to Szohôd," he implored, his voice dark.

The Captain was petrified. Tintin looked up at him intently, afraid to move or breathe lest he sway the man's will one way or the other - it was only after a time he realized Haddock's head was shaking, ever so slightly.

"Like hell you're going to Borduria right now," he condemned. "Do you have any idea what's going on over there?" And then, bitterly, "No, of course you do."

Tintin's lips came to rest on Haddock's knuckles again and remained there. Frozen as if caught in a misdeed, he didn't know what to do now.

"Let's...go for a walk, old man," the Captain said warmly, retrieving his hand and patting Tintin on the cheek. Tintin stayed where he was as Haddock went to settle the bill, his empty hand still hanging feebly in the balance until he heard his friend cursing and taking an entire table down with him.


	7. The Gloves

"It is rather easier for a dolt like me to get along when he can pay damages," the Captain said.

"So long as you don't start throwing money at all your problems," Tintin lectured. He was still a bit fraught, ashamed of his stunt in the smoking room, but misgivings were fading fast beneath the clear skies of the harbor.

"A man can't live on cake alone," Haddock concurred. He stopped and turned, halting Tintin in his tracks. "...nor on the Bordurian Dinar, from what I hear."

"I'd like to know why," Tintin requested.

As this wasn't an answer Haddock could supply, he ended the conversation by simply walking away.

He had only made it a few paces, twisting his gloves curtly behind his back, when he felt the planks rumble beneath his feet.

"Wait! Tintin,  _just_ -"

The Captain turned him around and kissed him.

Tintin threw up his hands in alarm. But it was over before it began. And now it was just the Captain holding him by the elbow, and the empty wharf above them, and he could hear the muted clanging of buoy bells and the horn of a trawler out on the water; a clock striking somewhere off in the city.

Swallowing, Tintin gently brought his hands down onto the Captain's arms.

"Do that again," he demanded.

When the Captain hesitated Tintin grabbed him by the lapels and yanked hard, sealing his mouth upon the older man's.

Haddock tasted of bitters and black Cavendish; there was a hint of something else on his breath, like espresso. Tintin hummed, coaxing his friend's lips further apart and ferreting out his tongue -  _ah, there_ \- something more dulcet - poached pear, perhaps...

The Captain was humming too, quite urgently. With a firm but diplomatic grip he carefully pried Tintin from him, whispering -

_"Not here."_

"-Of course," Tintin bleated, red in the face. Of course.

Haddock uttered a real curse and then several nonsense ones, pacing a crooked little circle as he collected Tintin's gloves from about his feet. "I didn't think that you - well, I mean, I  _did_ , but-"

"But what?" Tintin inquested. "Is it really that extraordinary?"

"-I just didn't think that  _you_ knew," Haddock admitted, and Tintin let off a brassy hoot of laughter.

"Yes, yes, I'm sure that's all very amusing," Haddock drawled. "But you let on nothing."

He began working Tintin's gloves back onto his hands for lack of anything publicly suitable to do. Tintin slyly wiggled his fingers in cooperation. His heart was beating in his throat; his whole body throbbed with anxious heat.

"So you were just going to leave it until I went out of my mind and came pounding on your door one evening?" he teased. "Waking up poor Nestor with my depravity, throwing myself at your mercy in the middle of the night...?"

"You wouldn't do that," Haddock refuted, his voice thinning nervously.

"Isn't that what we all tell ourselves before doing something foolish?" Tintin said, emboldened. "I might well do something foolish right now, if we don't get out of here soon..."

He collapsed slightly as if disposed to see to him right then and there, and Haddock seized him by the wrists in an instant, hauling him brusquely back to his feet.

Tintin hadn't expected this - he had only been kidding, after all - and something irrepressibly animal burgeoned in him at the rough contact, broad and cryptic.

Evidently fearing he'd do it again, Haddock held him securely by one arm as he fit the leather snug between his knuckles. "Calamity knows us too well," he grumbled, "and here you are as always, flagrantly mocking it in open terrain."

Nonetheless, he sounded more amused than upset, surveying the harbor with mischief set in his eyes.

His hands suddenly stilled on Tintin's, an airy sigh leaving him.


	8. The Roman Getup

The _Karaboudjan_ stood vast as Tintin remembered, casting a massive shadow across the pier.

He gazed up wistfully at the letters on her stern as Haddock shared a smoke with the dockhands on duty. Tintin didn't mind waiting. There was something oddly gratifying in denying himself the Captain's attentions for just a little bit longer, observing him from afar as his own longing burnt a hole in him slowly.

The dockhands were laughing at something Haddock had said. It appeared he was relieving them of duty.

"Are you allowed to do that?" Tintin questioned when he returned. The Captain winked, sliding his cigarette case into his pocket, and then he beckoned for Tintin to follow him up the gangway.

It took him several tries to open the wheelhouse door, which still jammed stubbornly as ever; eventually he resorted to loosening one of the bolts on the hinge ( _"Disgraceful, breaking into your own ship,"_ _Tintin scolded_ ), and then he had the journalist against the helm, his whiskers planted on Tintin's neck.

"This vessel's under contract now," Tintin reminded him softly, or rather tried - gloves squeezed taut around the handrail, the breath dropped out of him in measures. "It wouldn't do to befoul the place."

 _"She's seen worse,"_ Haddock reminded him.

Indeed, she had. Tintin recalled the peaty sludge and damp of the deck when he had first been brought aboard all those years ago, the flower-sweet stench that had drifted from the hold and tarnished all of the passageways above with a ripe, pungent odor.

He pulled one of his gloves off with his teeth and ran his fingers through Haddock's hair, taking in the scent of it. It smelled of tobacco and nothing else.

"Were you here when the Thompsons had to clean all of Allan's periodicals out from under his bunk? And take them in for evidence?"

" _Ha!_ No!"

"They couldn't bring themselves to even look at it," Tintin chuckled. "It was some of the most audacious filth I'd ever seen."

Haddock rumbled with laughter against him. He was in terrific, lighthearted spirits, even as his touch carried with it an unfathomable wickedness - Tintin was rapidly being robbed of his coat and jacket; being driven, quite aggressively, up onto the chart table.

"I was tasked with sorting through it all," Tintin said. "And your things, as well."

Haddock had already pared Tintin's shirt off one shoulder and was purpling the root of his throat when he'd said this, and now it was his turn to look caught in a misdeed. He paused, a certain modesty overtaking him that made Tintin's heart still, and then he looked rather reticent.

"I kept it all," Tintin professed. "It's in a nook under my bed. I take it out and look at it sometimes, when I'm fraught..."

He trailed off hesitantly as he found the Captain still quite overwhelmed - his caresses were becoming more chaste, his kisses more docile.

"Oh, but my favorite is the chap in the Roman getup," the journalist said, hoping to lighten the atmosphere. "He made me feel I had a fighting chance! I was half-concerned you would be finding yourself some prizefighter by the time you tired of me."

 _"Ah!"_ Haddock said. The voraciousness of his bark startled Tintin for how quiet he'd been.  _"But if I don't see you sweet-talking every Platonist that comes your way in the parlor-"_

"I've been dreaming about the night we showered together on the  _Aurora_ for two years," Tintin blurted in reproach. He hadn't meant for it to come out so crudely, but there it was. "I was so desperately hard and terrified, and... _quelle stupéfaction..._ you acted as if it was nothing - but it pleased you, didn't it? I thought I saw you glancing..."

 _"...Aye,"_ the Captain confirmed, his face sinking into Tintin's collarbone again. He seemed to be surging with renewed conquest; Tintin gasped to suddenly feel him stiff against his leg, arrogantly jabbing with aimless want.  _"You did more than glance."_

"I stared at you," Tintin said. "Every bit of you."

_"Looked me in the eye, too. What kind of gutsy..."_

"Captain," Tintin sighed. He felt paper crumpling beneath his head as he sank compliantly onto the table; the sound of one, two pencils hitting the floor. They would be fucking over the helm soon if he didn't put a stop to this. "Can you still get into your cabin?"


	9. The Shirt

Tintin shucked his open garments onto the chair, fighting a shudder as the air grazed his bare back.

The Captain was darkening the doorway, looking at him with unabashed hunger.

His quarters seemed a little smaller than Tintin remembered, or perhaps it was that Haddock was standing so imperiously in his coat and hat, taking up a good deal of the wall. He was like a great black stripe painted thick across the door, a portent of maleficence. Tintin shivered as he had in his apartment that morning he'd first seen the Captain rise out of his car - a despairing, pleasurable shiver.

"Please take that godforsaken thing off," he requested, and Haddock's thousand-franc coat collapsed into a shapeless mass on the floor.

Tintin pilfered his hat, tore at the buttons of his jacket and vest. Haddock let it happen. In his haste to unfasten the Captain's suspenders the reporter struck himself in the face, but he was undeterred - he wanted so badly to see what he had seen in his dreams, to do what he had done in his dreams.

He grabbed Haddock's shirt in two fistfuls and ripped it open, exposing the dense thicket of hair beneath.

"Oh," he whimpered, placing his mouth to it immediately.

He followed as many bends and contours as his fevered mind could recall - detouring slightly to give his friend a vicious little bite on the nipple - and then reached an arm down his trousers without reservation.

 _"Great snakes,"_ he whispered so quietly his own ears could barely pick it up. It was large and rigid, pulsing with distress against his fingers, and yet so silken; remarkably smooth, for how angry it was.

He could not tell if the Captain was panting or sobbing. He paused, looking keenly at the sailor, and Haddock wiped a drop of blood from the small nick his suspenders had left on Tintin's cheek.

Tintin sank to his knees.

He already had Haddock out and was servicing him before the man could post any objection, and already he was hearing the most delightful, tormented sounds come from above him. If the Captain wasn't sobbing before, he certainly was now, and Tintin intended to be sobbing as well before the evening's end.

He ventured on a particularly deep plunge and then detached with a wet pop, peering up impetuously.

"Captain, do you want to fuck me?"

"What sort of a question is that?" Haddock posed, and for the moment it sounded like he truly didn't know. He looked to be in some degree of mild psychological agony - Tintin waited patiently to let him attend to it, but it didn't seem to be getting any better.

Tintin stood.

Carefully taking the Captain's hands he guided them to his stomach, running his fingertips across the waistband of his trousers.

"If that's something you want I can do that," he confided softly.

One leg on Haddock's shoulder and one caught up in the hammock hanging above his bed, Tintin took the Captain.

It had been a monstrous effort to get things going again - Tintin with his dry spell jitters and Haddock with his hands greased smooth like he was going to take Tintin's very soul out of him, but the Captain was particularly sympathetic in his preparation, and was soon wresting all sorts of interesting pleas from the journalist.

The first thing Tintin felt when the Captain had entered him was relief. When he was fully seated - when the sweat broke fresh on Tintin's forehead and he began to remember just how this worked again - it occurred to him that there was not an inch the Captain could have gotten closer, and the thought filled him with such joy that he could not but move.

And then the Captain had begun to move, and such was how he had ended up partially snagged and hanging from the ceiling.

Not that he wasn't in total ecstasy - Haddock was still having at him with ruthless abandon. Tintin could not keep his mouth shut; his hair was plastered to his forehead with moisture, his cock spilling with seed.

 _"Captain, please don't ever leave me,"_ he wanted to say, but as he felt Haddock burst with warmth inside of him, he could only sob.


	10. Epilogue

"Tintin."

_"Mmh."_

"You've got to get up, lad. Your train leaves in thirty minutes."

Tintin opened one eye. The sliver of sky he could see out the porthole window was pink.

Throwing an arm over his face, he did nothing.

"Tintin, you're going to miss your train if you don't get up."

 _"Do it some other time,"_ Tintin murmured.

"All that balderdash about still having a profession, but now that you're sated...!"

Tintin struck out weakly, in the wrong direction.

 "Really though, we need to get you up and going."

_"They're expecting me at the station..."_

"Yes, that's why you need to get up."

 _"No, the-"_ Tintin yawned.  _"In Jákod."_

"The secret police?"

Tintin shushed him gently. Haddock couldn't tell if he was proffering a warning or trying to dream in peace.

"When did you figure this?"

_"I placed a call after you fell asleep...your switchboard is a mess..."_

Haddock was silent for a while. Tintin could hear gulls crying out on the pier, the sounds of cranes operating in the distance.

"So then...what?" the Captain asked, after a time.

 _"Well,"_ Tintin murmured as the bowels of the  _Karaboudjan_ shuddered to life under them, bottles rattling against the wall as the shouts of men echoed in the corridors.  _"I'd say we're headed wherever she's headed, because now we're both trapped in this room."_

 


End file.
